throwing toxic waste barrels into the eternal river

 I had this old roommate who used to spend his days calling customer service numbers and making up arguments to have. Every day I'd hear him downstairs in the living room making a fuss about tuition payments or a refund or some policy and you could tell that he just liked doing it. He was also really anxious about money and who was making money and how much money they were making. And he stole my food multiple times.

Anyway that was 4 years ago and I'll still see him around town. This is bad to say but he doesn't feel human to me. He's like this android--going about his unknowable function. The last time I saw him was a few weeks ago when he appeared at the self-checkout directly across from me and I put my head down and acted like I didn't know him. He was on the phone with someone talking very loudly and from the twenty seconds that I was within earshot I could tell he was demanding to know how much money someone had or how much money they were making. This was at like 8:30 PM on a Sunday. 

And then so the story stars this guy but he's in a kind of post-apocalyptic future where it's wrapped back around to a very primitive society and for generations everyone had the brain implants and stopped speaking and we achieved the Human Instrumentality Project. 

No--wait, what happens is that total consciousness singularity is possible but it gets hidden behind a paywall so through the neural implant you can experience total light and acceptance and love but you only after you pay the subscription fee which you earn by throwing rusty metal drums of toxic waste into the Eternal River. You have to throw the sludge into the Eternal River to get a glimpse of the Totality. So no one interacts with anyone anymore--you just do your little goblin task with the other goblins to earn enough grub coins to go back into the god womb.

Anyway so that goes south at some point and everything gets blown up and we get nuclear winter and people are just holed up in little pockets of barren tundra for like a thousand years and we're back to grunts and following packs of big animals around. But like in the background for flavor there's the wreckage of skyscrapers and garbage and stuff.

So the episodes are all about the spiritual ancestor of my old roommate who wanders around hording and collecting cogs and sprockets and old mechanical junk and his neuroticism is just so potent that's it's lasted through these untold generations of progress and collapse and nothing and void and he's always getting upset over the perceived wealth of all the other human folk who are really just trying to survive and work together. And he's always "stealing" pieces of scrap from other people but really they're just piles of junk that people happen to be sitting next to and he's the only one who cares about any of it. And he's trying to charm them and put on a face to learn more about them and try to figure out how they're doing but like--that's trying to scuba dive in puddle deep water.